Richard Armstrong, director of CMOA from from 1996 to 2008, with Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Yellow Bath) when it was on view in the Scaife Galleries. This photograph, taken by Cornelia Karaffa, originally appeared in the September/October 1998 issue of Carnegie magazine.

Here’s an artist who has helped reinvigorate contemporary sculpture. She’s best known for having cast the interior of a rowhouse in East London. In the 1995 Carnegie International, Whiteread used the negative space of nine different chairs to make resin molds for her Hundred Spaces, a field of translucent abstractions. Yellow Bath is monumental and comparable to the larger work, and so seemed suitable for the collection.

Yellow Bath is made out of rubber and polystyrene. Here we are looking at the impression of a very ordinary, everyday object with a function—a cast-iron bathtub. Whiteread configures sculpture through negative spaces, and we’re encouraged to see this impression of a tub as an abstraction.

Armstrong, who came to CMOA in 1992 to organize the 1995 Carnegie International as curator of contemporary art, found Whiteread’s work refreshing. But not everyone in the contemporary art world at that time shared his sentiment. In critic Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of the 1995 International, she was less than impressed that Armstrong featured Whiteread’s work in the exhibition. She believed that one of the more well-known Young British Artists was an obvious choice:

Mr. Armstrong ignores Damien Hirst, intermittently the most convincing representative of the brash young artists who have reinvigorated the London art scene, in favor of the more sedate Rachel Whiteread. Her sculpture of 100 casts of the spaces beneath four chairs in translucent resin has a quirky geometry and like much else here, a rather too quiet mesmerizing beauty. It seems prematurely complacent.

Smith’s critique of Whiteread’s work as “too quiet” gets at the precise reason why Armstrong seems to have appreciated it. He was intrigued by her use of everyday objects as a way to ask audiences to reconsider their surroundings.

As Armstrong concluded his tour of the galleries that day in 1998, he realized that many of the artworks he highlighted had a common thread.

“I see now that by picking Bonnard’s Nude in a Bathtub and also Degas’ The Bath, and Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture Untitled (Yellow Bath),” he told R. Jay Gangewere, “I’ve created a recurring motif of bathing. I might be showing my evangelical Protestant roots, accidentally. There is baptism and washing away of sins in some of these pictures. I always think of art as a kind of salvation, even if there’s no afterlife.”

Uncrated: The Hidden Lives of Artworks is on view in the Scaife Lounge at Carnegie Museum of Art from March 9, 2015–May 8, 2015. Learn the stories behind some intriguing works from CMOA’s collection and find out more about the people who buy, sell, move, hang, clean, and care for them. Over the course of nine weeks, a team of registrars, conservators, preparators, and curators will be sharing their work with the public as they examine objects recently taken out of storage. Come back throughout the show and visit uncrated.cmoa.org to see what new discoveries the team is making.

The Invisible Photograph: From Underground to Subatomic

We’ve taken you from photographs stored Underground in a limestone mine and Andy Warhol drawings Trapped in an Amiga computer, to Extraterrestrial image data captured by a Lunar Orbiter and photographic treasures Discarded and rescued from the mists of obscurity by artist Joachim Schmid. Our five-part documentary series, The Invisible Photograph, reaches its final stop on a journey that has spanned the Atlantic Ocean with Subatomic: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, set at CERN, an epicenter of research in particle physics. See the documentary now and enjoy behind-the-scenes access to CERN’s ATLAS and AEgIS experiments, where photographic imaging—both digital and analog—is being used to visualize the subatomic world.

A People’s History of Pittsburgh: From Digital Archive to Photobook

The digital archive of A People’s History of Pittsburgh currently consists of over 1,500 photographs submitted by you, our public. Your stories have entertained, educated, and engaged us, and your images have revealed cherished moments that span more than a century. Now, the project is moving into its next iteration, following a lifecycle that will take it from digital to print. Artists-in-residence Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar are currently in the process of combing through your submissions for inclusion in a photobook, also titled A People’s History of Pittsburgh, that will be released this May. Last week, a lucky group of CMOA staffers got a sneak preview of the artists’ preliminary concept and design for the photobook and we can’t wait to see it in finished form. The books will release in early May—just in time for Mother’s Day!

#NowSeeThis: From Soup to Nuts

To celebrate the Initiative’s first year of programming, the museum is hosting #NowSeeThis, a party featuring national music acts, interactive installations, and your submissions to nowseethis.org over the past year. Save the date on May 9 and stay tuned for more details, coming soon.

Robert Adams, Berthoud, Colorado, 1976. Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

This Picture: From Robert Adams to Alec Soth to You

This month, we featured a quiet and contemplative photograph by Robert Adams and received a number of introspective responses from you. When an image evokes a mood or feeling that is entirely nonvisual—like the feel of a hot summer’s day, or the sound of leaves rustling in a humid evening breeze—it can be entirely transporting, as it was for photographer Alec Soth. In his own response to this photograph, Soth credits this photograph by Adams as the inspiration for his own practice.

My favorite responses from this month refer to that indescribable aura captured in Adams’s photograph. Congratulations go out to Tiffany Smith, Groana Melendez, and Tori Marchiony! You are this month’s winners of the Program Manager’s Picks Contest. Your prize is free tickets to NowSeeThis, the closing party for the first cycle of the Initiative! Details on how to redeem your prize will be coming your way soon.

Charles “Teenie” Harris, billboard at the corner of Crawford Street and Centre Avenue, denouncing the redevelopment of the lower Hill District, 1969. Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Family Fund.

The home my wife and I share sits in an impressive building on Fifth Avenue. If I peer out our kitchen window and glance right, I’ll see Dinwiddie Street. A 15-second drive up Dinwiddie leads to Centre Avenue. The Hill House, the Thelma Lovette YMCA, the Alma Speed Fox Building, and perhaps the most politically contentious Shop ‘n Save in the country all sit within a five-minute walk. We do not live in the Hill District. This awkward stretch of land that exists between Oakland, downtown, the Hill, and the South Side is technically called Uptown—a differentiation that definitely seems to matter to pizza delivery men. But this apartment we live in—located in a building that was once Fifth Avenue High School and is now the Fifth Avenue School Lofts—and the hows, whys, and whats of how people came to live in this long-dead school building, tells a Hill District story. A Pittsburgh story. A black America story. A Teenie Harris story.

The story of how the Fifth Avenue School Lofts came to exist is a complicated one that I will attempt to simplify. It is also contentious. There will be people who will vehemently disagree with what I’m about to say, either claiming that I’m intentionally disregarding important context or attempting to skew facts to promote an agenda. I am doing neither. What I am doing is telling this story how I’ve come to see it.

The Fifth Avenue School Lofts is one of a dozen or so upscale inner-city redevelopments that have taken place in Pittsburgh over the last decade. These redevelopments have been spurred on by the city’s status as an emerging hub of business, technology, education, and culture. Rarely does a month pass without Pittsburgh ranking near or at the top of some list of the country’s best cities. This helped cause the city’s decades-long population decline to plateau and, according to the latest census, reverse. People are moving and staying here now. Young white professionals, specifically. And they need somewhere modern, urban, accessible, and cool to live; and what’s more modern, urban, accessible, and cool than a refurbished schoolhouse a half-mile from town?

These lofts exist here because Fifth Avenue High School—a dominant city sports power that served the lower Hill and includes Cyril Wecht among its alumni—was long vacant. The Fifth Avenue High School building was long vacant because it was closed in 1976. It was closed in 1976 because there weren’t enough high school–aged kids in the lower Hill to fill the classrooms. There weren’t enough school-aged kids in the lower Hill to fill the classrooms because the population of the lower Hill experienced a sharp decline. The population of the lower Hill experienced a large decline because many of the lower Hill’s residents were forced to move—displaced to East Liberty, Homewood, and other parts of the city. Many of the lower Hill’s residents were displaced because the city of Pittsburgh prioritized creating space to build the Civic Arena over the thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses already existing in that space. The Fifth Avenue High School Lofts exist today because the vibrant and diverse Hill District immortalized by Teenie Harris no longer does.

The Hill District itself is still there today. Bedford, Wiley, Webster—these streets aren’t going anywhere. There are several thriving businesses. A few renowned churches. And hundreds of homeowners. Black homeowners who’ve either been able to hold on to older properties or take advantage of some of the recently built homes. The Hill is not dead. It will continue to survive. But the level of survival has changed. Today’s Hill District is dealing with the effects of post-colonization—the resource drain, the property plunder, the native population drop—without ever actually being colonized.

The Pittsburgh chapter in the centuries-long black American story is told with a drive on Centre from the gleaming new Consol Energy Center to the soon-to-be-developed-into-more-modern-urban-accessible-and-cool-apartments Schenley High School building—million-dollar bookends evidencing the city’s oft-publicized revitalization. Each underdeveloped block between them a different page; each empty corner a different footnote. All articulating exactly why the recent #BlackLivesMatter campaign is so vital. And so controversial. Because America has long operated with the latent belief that black lives, and black bodies, and black families, and black businesses, and black properties, and black histories, and black legacies do not.

I imagine that the thousands of people photographed by Teenie Harris in the 1940s and 1950s—schoolteachers and bandleaders; coal miners and Pittsburgh Crawfords; nurses and nannies; politicians and Charlie Parker—would have predicted a better Pittsburgh in 2015. And they would have been right. The city is better. Much better. The population is growing. The air is clearer. The water is cleaner. Black people can (finally) shop downtown. It’s one of the best cities in the country. Its transition from steel town to technology hub has been phenomenal. The parks are breathtaking. The cultural district is world renowned. The topography is, and will always be, beautiful. And even the (black!) president loves Pamela’s.

Bernard Tschumi is today perhaps best known for his New Acropolis Museum, completed in 2009 close to the historic Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Born and educated in Switzerland, Tschumi is truly a transatlantic architect, operating his practice from offices in Paris and New York. Here at the Heinz Architectural Center, we are lucky to have four drawings or montages from Tschumi’s early Manhattan Transcripts series, a theoretical project from the late 1970s in which architecture is defined as much by event or narrative as by traditional building form.

In the 1980s, Tschumi won the competition for an urban park at La Villette in the northeast quarter of Paris. The most radical of the grands projets initiated by President François Mitterand, La Villette is informed by Tschumi’s close attention to contemporary philosophy and film theory. His subsequent appointment as Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning at Columbia University led to a remarkable 15-year leadership that embraced new computer technologies and a new generation of architectural thinkers.

Last summer the Pompidou Center in Paris hosted an extensive retrospective of Tschumi’s work, a rare accolade for a contemporary architect. See my review here for New York’s Architects’ Newspaper. Carnegie Lecture Hall can be accessed directly from Schenley Drive or from the rear of the Museum of Art. The lecture will commence promptly at 5:30 and is free to all.

Kirsten Strayer, Time-Based Media Project volunteer, watching Debt Begins at 20, a film by Stephanie Beroes currently on view in the Scaife Galleries at CMOA. Photograph: Kate Barbera.

For the past four months, I’ve been volunteering with the Time-Based Media Project at Carnegie Museum of Art. Primarily, I’ve been writing content that will appear online in the catalogue—working to help put the films in their larger historical and artistic context. In other words, I’ve been watching the films and videos and writing about them, something I already do for my job in Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. I’ve especially enjoyed this project because—even though my professional research concerns Mexican narrative and feature films—I’ve always been a fan of American experimental films. Since starting this project, I’ve been watching old favorites that I haven’t seen since my early years in graduate school and reading about their history for the first time.

I’ve noticed, however, that when people write about experimental film, whether in histories, magazines, or journals, it appears as though they’re writing for those already converted—viewers who already know and appreciate particular films, and are, strictly speaking, “fans” like myself. The authors address a rather small group of filmgoers: scholars, filmmakers, artists, and occasional cineastes. Whether amateur or professional, these are viewers who haven’t just seen particular films but know the historic details surrounding the films, or which filmmakers worked with other filmmakers, or stories of how so many films were made by circles of friends with little money or resources. While this idea of a small, committed viewership of experimental cinema probably has some accuracy, the archival collection of materials at CMOA suggests that there was a sizeable audience during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—the peak years of the Film Program when audiences filled the theater to see programs of new works or the monthly (or bi-weekly) experimental film programs from the permanent collection. Of course, experimental film has never garnered the broad audience of conventional film, but the experimental film theatrical experience was diverse and sustained, showing older, favorite experimental works and promoting younger, unknown independent filmmakers, something that happens far more rarely in Pittsburgh today.

Audience at the 1976 May Day screening program, an event that was hosted annually by the Film Section at CMOA. Image from the Department of Film and Video archive.

In looking over the CMOA Program Notes beginning in 1970, I can clearly see a pattern of showing fewer and fewer experimental films during the 1990s and beyond. Early program notes show regular visits by experimental filmmakers. For example, in 1972 the department brought eight well-known filmmakers to show their work at the museum theater. However, later years showed fewer visits by filmmakers, and those that did visit were more likely to produce independent but nevertheless more traditional, feature-length fictional narratives (for example: Robert Altman in 1983, Peter Greenaway in 1984, and Raúl Ruiz in 1990). While this shift does not negate the cultural importance of bringing significant narrative filmmakers to Pittsburgh, it raises the question of why there has been a decline in experimental exhibition in theaters toward the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. And while the specificity of CMOA’s programming strategies speak to its own local concerns, Pittsburgh is not the only city in which theatrical venues for experimental film have waned. New York, perhaps the quintessential American city for experimental, non-narrative cinema, also experienced a similar decline in theatrical exhibition. While experimental film and videos are still significant to the American art world, as a film-going public we rarely go to the theater to screen experimental cinema.

The evidence of such a decline raises even more questions: Why don’t viewers see experimental films in the theater, why has reception changed so much, and (even) does it matter to the circulation of experimental cinema? Can we still watch these older experimental films in exhibition space and have the same experience, or is the way we watch experimental cinema integral to specific pleasures? Of course, when we watch film in the theater, we are ostensibly alone, in the dark, surrounded by strangers, and focused entirely on the screen in front of us (what Roland Barthes calls the “cocoon” of cinema). This is, of course, quite different than the idea of accessing these works in a digital catalogue or in an exhibition room. To begin to think through these questions, I researched the programming changes in the United States over the past 40 years and sat down briefly with Dr. Lucy Fischer, who was Assistant Curator at CMOA from 1978-1979 and is now Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. And I discovered that the shift away from projection stems from changes in technology, tastes, and the experiences of art viewership more broadly.

One of the first possible reasons for the decline in theatrical exhibition is the shift to video, an issue that Kate Barbera and Emily Davis discussed in an earlier post here on the CMOA Blog. At the moment that American experimental filmmaking was at its apex, avant-garde and experimental moving-image art was already shifting to video production. Nam June Paik first exhibited manipulated television as early as 1963, and by the early 1970s video artists such as Peter Campus and John Baldessari brought video making to the forefront of media experimentation. Video was less expensive, more mobile, and more flexible, but it was also a profoundly different way of using the moving image that could highlight immediacy in a way that film could not. Because video is shown on media monitors (which have a technological and visual similarity to the television set, and thus already make media smaller and more of a domestic object), its visual pleasure is not based in the largeness of the movie screen but in the smallness and intimacy of the television monitor. While technically it was possible to project video on larger screens, many of the videos weren’t produced for such a large-scale visual presentation, and many even demanded a small-scale visual perspective. As such, experimental videos lend themselves more to museum installation than large screen projection.

Installation shot from the CMOA exhibition Points of Departure: Origins in Video, which featured artworks from Peter Campus, Beryl Korot, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, and was on view at CMOA from November 1990 to January 1991. Image from the Department of Film and Video archive.

And the shift to video also helped to increase importance of the gallery space as the location for museum moving-image spectatorship. Of course, films have been shown in galleries in installation spaces during the early to mid-20th century, even before video. But the pleasures of video and televisual streaming fit well with the smaller spaces and mobile viewer. If cinema and the theater are modern, the gallery viewing experience is profoundly post-modern, allowing for the heightened self-reflexivity to comment on and reconfigure spectatorship. As Catherine Fowler notes: “Another obvious development in the gallery space is the implied activity of the visitor, who can perambulate, choose when to enter or exit, where to stand, sit or walk, and even (with multi-screen work) where to look.” The space of the gallery doesn’t insist on sitting quietly and watching. Instead, the viewer can move about, enter or leave the field of vision at any time, and choose her angle of viewing.

Museum visitors viewing filmmaker Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, which was on display in CMOA’s Scaife Gallery during the Carnegie International exhibition in 2013.

The exhibition gallery is radically different from a theater that shows traditional cinematic text; a theater expects a stable subject who watches and the consistency of a darkened room. The pleasures explored in and exploited by this kind of viewing constitutes the cinematic experience, which is made up of not just the film itself but the darkened theater, the sound of the projector, the texture of the film strip, and the effects that watching film in a darkened theater produces. And while this cocoon-like atmosphere has always been part of the commercial experience, it has also played a significant role in the expectations and experience of experimental cinema. And whether films worked with the pleasures of the dark, private, and isolating milieu (the dream films of Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger for example) or actively challenge it (the cerebral films of Hollis Frampton), the theatrical experience was an active part of viewing 16mm films during the experimental film’s heyday, just as the exhibition gallery—with the particular challenges and conventions it produces—forms the installation experience in unique ways. In fact, Dr. Fischer cites the waning of the importance of the cinematic experience as one of the significant reasons for the decline of experimental theatrical exhibition:

Some of the filmmakers didn’t want to make the shift away from the theatrical exhibition and the whole experience of cinematic spectatorship, which occurs in the dark, in the theater. And it’s a different thing to view films on monitors in a museum; it takes me a lot more to be moved walking through an installation gallery, to be captured by the work… [In contrast] when you make a decision to enter a theater, there’s something about the expectation of your full concentration there. There are not the same viewing expectations in a gallery.

Although there is much lost with the decline of the theatrical experience, there is also much gained by inclusion of experimental films in different forms. DVDs, online viewing platforms, and other modes for digital reception have given rarely seen films new life. Online, I have seen little-known films never distributed in the US, clips from silent films thought lost and recently restored, and experimental films that never were distributed during the life of the filmmaker. In fact, the Internet has been the driving catalyst for the rediscovery of rare films outside of museums, archives, and collections—fans and scholars, filmmakers and cineastes alike have put up rare films untouched by contemporary distributors. And yet, popular online viewing platforms and DVD distributions have also shown the gaps that remain. For example, many films are still not available to be seen at all because they were made specifically to be played on a 16mm projector, and either artists or the estates of those artists have remained consistent in their desire to only have their films shown in this original format. In looking over this collection, I began to think about how many of these films I have never seen or never had a chance to see because they haven’t been digitized. Even as we enlarge our digitized cinema, there are films in which the experience of viewing changes profoundly with a digitized medium. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be seen digitally, or that the individual filmmakers’ desires do not remain important. Instead, newfound expansion of digital film should help to rethink how to integrate the non-digital and theatrical experience into 21st-century viewing practices. I wonder if it’s possible to use this digital revival to recover the experience of theatrical reception. As the films reach a new generation of film viewers, we may be able to illustrate why the theatrical experience is part of the reason that experimental film viewers watch—and love—these films.